faded jeans as she squeezed more successfully than he past the two bicycles stacked against the walls. The mildly unpleasant smell was of fish.
“Quent is in the breakfast room where he’s grooming his shitty dog. Mum said to make tea if you got here first, so we’ll join him there.”
“Neither of you at school then?” Davey asked, still addressing her posterior as he followed her to the deeper recesses of the gloomy house. “Taking time off for me? Should I be flattered?”
“It’s a holiday, idiot! You forgotten all about English holidays out there?”
He strove for flippancy to match hers. “What’s the point of trying to remember what you people seem to change every year? I thought these days you just went in for long weekends and, in any case, were always copying the Americans.” Then quickly, in the hope it was before she could get her nasty little teeth into that, he followed up with: “So what are we celebrating? Martin Luther King Day?”
“Funeee! As a matter of fact, it’s Michaelmas Day. Now that means it’s the twenty-ninth of September, and I have a hunch, dear Uncle Davey, that you must think it’s January ’cause, if I’m not mistaken, your murdered black leader is celebrated during that month.”
He resisted the temptation to point out she was referring to the United States and not Canada. But he was also having difficulty in accepting the fact that he’d been completely unaware of what month it was, let alone the day. His immediate inclination was to dismiss the precision of dates as something his Ken always took care of. But the presence of this bumptious teenager and her seventeen-year-old brother whom he was about to confront made him uncomfortably conscious he was nearly fifty years their senior. Davey reflected dourly that only the old can be four months out in their diurnal reckoning. He grimaced to himself as he decided it would be prudent to let the matter of dates drop. So he said nothing as they entered the room where Quentin, stripped to the waist, was on his knees, carefully combing and occasionally trimming the ears of a handsome clumber spaniel. The boy didn’t stop what he was doing but addressed the newcomer over his shoulder.
“Hello, Uncle Davey. Welcome to Ladbroke Grove. I’m sorry you caught me on Nigel’s bath day, but I had booked today knowing I’d be home from school. Besides, Mumsie has been nagging about dog hair on her bloody furniture ever since last summer. Where’s Ken? Shopping while you deal with the boring relatives?”
During their past two visits, both transatlantic visitors had nursed growing suspicions as to whether young Quentin would turn out gay or not. From vague remarks his mother had dropped, from the evidence of their own eyes and ears at some of his more outrageous comments, plus the occasional flip of a hip or limpness of wrist, there was gathering evidence to lead to the conclusion that either he was on the highway to queendom or that he must have prissy little fag friends at school or elsewhere whom he was seeking to emulate for some reason or other.
But for decades Ken and Davey had nursed a house rule between them: never suggest or even imply a homosexual likelihood about a member of each other’s family or the sons of their friends to a third party. That is, unless their suspect freely provided such information about himself. But that had never happened.
Quentin, as Davey’s youngest male second cousin, was the last in line to qualify as “family” who just might prove to be gay. But much as the two men covertly commented on his unkempt beauty, they would be the last to hint he might be more like themselves than the rest of his family. Accordingly, and perhaps with unwitting cruelty, they’d also be the last to proffer him any kind of germane advice.
In any case, Davey wasn’t about to change tactics at this juncture as the boy sprawled lissome legs before him and shook those handsome curls away from the soft features of his still-puppyish face.
“Don’t you think Nigel looks darling? All the bitches in the square think he’s a doll, and so do some of the boys.”
“I’ll put the kettle on while you try to shock Uncle Davey,” Hester told her brother. “You might also explain to him what the ridiculous Feast of St. Michael and All the Angels means and why it gives him the privilege of seeing his darling second cousins and not just their flustered mother.”
In the event Quentin did no such thing. He did say it was a holiday at both St Hilda’s School for Girls and his own Blesford Ride School, but for the most part he spoke of his adored spaniel, Nigel, and then of his plans to accompany three school pals the following summer to the south of France.
“Do you ever go to Cornwall these days?” Davey asked him when the kid had exhausted the lengthy description of his holiday plans.
“No. Why should I?”
Davey was taken aback. This kind of frankness wasn’t the version he and Ken entertained. “Well, your mother…” he murmured. “I thought she was always going back to Falmouth.”
“Only when her horrible parents were alive and blackmailed her. As soon as the Gramps were dead, she was finally free of all that Cornish balls—not to mention their revolting Methodism.”
“So she sent us to posh schools—call that an improvement!” Hester was back with us, a tray of cups and saucers in her hand. “Personally, when I’m through at St. Hilda’s, I shall be looking for a college—and a country, come to that—where God is seen as a piece of shit and religion generally as something that should’ve gone out with gaslight and horse-drawn buses.”
“Hester’s such a romantic,” her brother commented from the floor. “At least my school doesn’t flog God. We’re more into dog than God at Blesford, aren’t we, Nigel?”
“Milk and sugar—or are you gone all American?” Hester asked.
By now Davey was counting the seconds to his cousin’s return from wherever the hell she’d gone. But he was still determined to remain temperate with these snotty “Brit-pricks,” as he sometimes referred to them when discussing them with his partner.
“I’m surprised you should bother to ask yet again,” he said. “For one thing you know I’m a Canadian and did not become a Yank. Your other mistake is more expected, as I get the impression you both have decided to stamp out any knowledge of your Cornish heritage. Such as never taking sugar in any beverage. Then isn’t your generation desperately trying to be rootless, classless, and against national history so as to end up dutiful little Europeans? That would certainly account for the wholesale ignorance in your family’s personal background.”
“Oh, my God!” Quentin shrieked, abandoning his combing and rolling over a couple of times on the carpet. “We’ve got an Enoch Powell with us.” He smirked. “An Enoch not a eunuch, that is.”
Davey recalled the racist MP who had been a onetime British cabinet minister until fired for his attitude toward nonwhite immigrants. He wasn’t flattered by the comparison. “At the right time and in the right place,” he snarled, “I’ll give you my liberal views on the brotherhood of man.”
“On the sisterhood, too, I hope,” Hester added pertly.
“And on the idiocies of linguistic feminism,” he snapped in her direction. “In the meantime let’s stick to the implications of the fact-starved view of history you both seem to exemplify. It is, of course, an early indication of the decline of civilization.”
Sometimes Davey didn’t like himself, particularly. This was one of them. Then he also resented the power of these youthful two to evoke the worst in him.
“Oh,
